


A Quickening Tempo

by IraDeu



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Multi, after the end, depression incarnate, i don't know if forrest is trans either
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 09:53:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15458754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IraDeu/pseuds/IraDeu
Summary: Their countries do not get along, have never gotten along. But a treaty has been forged, and so now a peace is creating itself, new relations forming out of long-held anxieties subdued and removed. The world is safe now. The people aren't.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> don't know if im being sad or edgy but you know what I do know? ive written these characters badly that's what
> 
> disclaimer: i have not played fates in quite a while and do not remember a single plot element so i might be playing calvinball for maximum fun points

**Azura**

Valla has been ravaged. She combs her fingers through the embers of a world that once was great and once was menaced but now is ruins. What's left of her people do not look her in the eyes.

Her throne is made of bones. Her comrades do not visit. The stars shine below her. She is, and always shall be, queen. 

* * *

 

 

**Caeldori**

She has lived in two places - in a castle in the sky, and a village full of ghosts. She has never had a real friend, doesn't know what catcalls mean, and she is lead so, so far astray before they find her.

Dwyer's the one that meets her, the first and every time. She remembers those places, as she tries to construct a new identity for herself: the alley, where he found her wrapped in an oversized filthy coat; the hotel, one girl in a place with many, many girls as lost as her; lost in a bad part of town with something painted on her face; in the basement of a church that never had her interests at heart. Caeldori is brilliant and Caeldori is wise and Caeldori expects everyone to be just as kind as her. Dwyer is a boring young man that runs a potion shop and Caeldori was always meant for more. He knows this. He knows this well. 

* * *

 

**Kaze**

He does his best. Midori's growing up to be a sweet girl, and Oboro's store is going fine. Everything is good. He comes home to his family and he feels content for the first time in a long time. That's enough, now. 

* * *

 

**Camilla**

She buys a little house in the Hoshidan countryside and takes no visitors. She figures she's earned it. She gets her dear Keaton and Velouria for three days a week and spends the rest of the time alone and surrounded by quiet. She lives in a bubble of noiselessness where she and her family are the only intelligent creatures for a hundred miles in any direction. And it is this way, not through interaction with others but through her own creation, that she finds herself.

It is very good. 

* * *

 

**Forrest**

Forrest has been told many times that Nohrian streets are not safe, that it is forbidden to leave the castle after dark. Leo pretends that this is a safety thing. Forrest knows what it is, and knows that Leo is waiting for any degree of certainty. Leo tries his best, but he's always been obsessive and overprotective and overcorrecting, and the way he leaves out the transmutation potions is obnoxious and degrading. Takumi just asked, once. "Are you a girl?"

It feels like a false choice. Forrest doesn't know. Not yet, anyway.

And, until then, the tower.  

* * *

 

**Ignatius**

He can't leave. He is dropped home and given a hero's welcome and dragged around Benny's village to meet his new relatives and he lies awake thinking about the people that are endangered with every moment of rest. He has hopes and dreams but he's never felt more useless than he has when he's studying. He can do one thing. Let him do it well.

And so he dies in another way.

* * *

 

**Niles**

He thinks it's funny that the price for not following his wife to Hell is being kicked back onto the streets. Shigure's tried to take him in. Shigure's dragged him by his cape and dragged him to the palace and sicced the healers on him. Niles can't explain why he doesn't want his help. He knows well enough he should be grateful. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i enjoy the idea that hoshidan and nohrian are distinct languages and that corrin's army is speaking some pidgin trading language, mostly because imagine tokipona but with "senpai" and "fuck" thrown in

**Flora**

A small part of her feels glad that Jakob's son never amounted to very much. A much larger part of that hates herself for feeling that, hates herself for not standing up to him, hates herself for letting Jakob treat anyone that way, hates herself for not finding him and pinning him down and marrying him. That ship has sailed. That ship has sailed. Dwyer is kind to her and gives her a discount on love potions and _knows_. He is twenty, now, barely younger than his father and he still seems like a child, so easily influenced by someone so young. Dwyer is kinder than his father, but less loyal. Jakob has teeth, and Dwyer does not.

It would be easier if she could fall for him, actually, but she hasn't. The potions he gives her are fakes. She buys them anyway. Her love for Jakob hardens, like a stone in her throat.

* * *

 

**Sakura**

She forgets Elise, eventually.

* * *

 

**Asugi**

Saizo dies young. Asugi takes his name, sort of, but it doesn't fit him. Never has. He wishes he had a brother, had the guts to be a samurai, had the skill or focus or talent to take a trade. Kagero sits by the window and hasn't spoken to him in weeks.

There's a lot he's okay with. Asugi likes to think of himself as someone that can go through a lot. Someone who's good at being alone.

He wanders through Nohr. People watch him with angry eyes; Nohr is still the blighted place it has always been. Nohr is starving and will always starve. The capital feels like a painted-on facade, a mask that doesn't know it's not a face.

* * *

 

**Laslow**

He can't find his way home. He wanders through the forest holding his daughter's hand and he fails to find the gate. Odin and Selena and Ophelia left already. He wanted a little more time. 

He wonders if Lucina will be mad at him. For Soleil. And Hana. And... of course she will. Even if it was a short thing (an accident, loneliness anxious bad habit regret), even if Hana's not coming back with him, even if Soleil somehow turned into the sister he never had, even if he grovels, Lucina won't look him in the eyes.

* * *

 

**Rinkah**

She cannot unsee what she has seen. Her crown feels heavy, now.

* * *

 

**Hana**

Her name's been ruined. Her daughter picked her father over her, and he was a liar and a cheat and a scoundrel and Hana hopes that one day she'll be able to put this all behind her. She goes back into Sakura's service and whips training dummies into sawdust and her arms are sore and she does not dream. When she sees Nohrian steel she cries.

* * *

 

**Shiro**

Shiro's younger brother, Aihara, is born two years after he arrives. Shiro will never take the crown. Ryoma delegates him to random administrative work until he gets fed up and leaves one day.

He doesn't know how to see Ryoma, but it's not good. It's never been good, not really. He was used and used and now he is no longer useful and pliable and good, and now Ryoma has bigger problems than him.

Once your parents let you know they don't like you, there's very little else that matters. Shiro starts fights in Nohrian pubs and Hoshidan bathhouses and his father comes, occasionally, to clean up the mess he's made. Each time it's worse. Hoshido sits up straight and exalts in the sun that blinds it. His skin burns. His father pretends he was right all along. The truce becomes anxious, held together by confused immigration and lavish displays of affection from the child soldiers that are now celebrities.

Shiro has no reason not to keep going. He's a hero, now. Forever and always.

* * *

 

**Kaden**

Kaden has fallen in love with a human woman. This is a forbidden act; Kitsunes have been burned too many times to view humanity as anything other than a weakness to be exploited, another thing to build their magics on, another weapon to use to keep yourself alive. Kitsunes are monsters and know it, and the hamlet has not been capable of love for a long time. His child is a changeling, cursed and deformed, and they devour Selkie whole.

Kitsunes are not made for love. Kaden loses himself, again.

* * *

 

**Soleil**

The great-granddaughter of Validar, the granddaughter of Grima, chaos incarnate, is a child soldier working through her third beer this hour in a seedy bar on the edge of Plegia. It's 2 AM. All the girls left a while ago. She wasn't lucky tonight.

Things really didn't have the option to go well when she called her stepmom cute. And then her grandmother. Her dad had been looking forward to that. The language is strange; she remembers it from her childhood, but it's not quite enough for her to say things without knowing she sounds strange. She doesn't belong here. She wants to fall deep inside Nohr's caverns, be burnt by Hoshido's sunlight. She doesn't belong there, either. She's just a stupid little girl that nobody's ever wanted, that isn't fun to be around even when she lies her best.

She finishes off her drink in one long swig. When the glass slams on the table, someone in her periphery jumps. She never liked her mom anyway. She was so tough on her; she remembers the hours they'd spend training and she scraped her arm, bright red everywhere and Hana tied the bandages around her and said it was to keep her heart inside when she didn't understand and she starts crying. A boy walks up to her and asks her what's wrong and she accidentally spills her drink. She watches it ooze onto the floor. The boy is saying something; she pulls out her dagger and he backs away.

The daughter of the king consort of the great kingdom of Ylisse has a vision of herself here in thirty years and walks out. At ten tomorrow she's performing a show to convince the local city guard to let her in. She'll probably wake up at nine and show off something that she learned the thirtieth time she killed a man, and they'll let her in and she'll make money as long as she doesn't fuck up too hard. Through no virtue of her own, she's made it.

* * *

 

**Hinoka**

Sometimes people want to not see you in pain more than they want to help you. It's hard to look at Takumi, sometimes. She wonders if she ever really loved him, what she's doing with her life.

They're all a mess, really. She wishes Ryoma could admit it, that they've all been ruined, that they all need help, that they can't do this alone. But he won't, and so they will.

* * *

 

**Elise**

She will keep going until she never remembers that there was anyone to forget.

* * *

 

**Velouria**

The wolfskins love her. She is proof of everything they have wished for forever - that healing is possible, that the world does not wish to devour them, that they can be whole again. When she is chief, she brings a delegation of wolfskin to the capital every week, the brave ones, the curious ones, the ones looking for something, and she shows them the most beautiful things and to the most beautiful people and slowly, they heal.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know my favorite part about prozac is that before it actually starts working it makes everything so much fucking worse!!!!!! i was surprised when they diagnosed me until i reread this consider this a Late Warning

**Shigure**

He doesn't know what's going on anymore. He and Dwyer had a game going that started off placing bets on when Soleil and Velouria would finally hook up and began to mutate into keeping tabs on everyone, trying to find the people they love and might still love them back. The tone hasn't shifted, though. Not much, but that's probably just a Dwyer thing.

Things are getting bad again. When Shigure sees him, he looks exhausted. When he eats, it's voracious, but he never gains weight; Shigure has the sneaking suspicion that Dwyer only eats when he's around. And his nails are bloody and short and the skin underneath is peeled off raw.

Dwyer fidgets, but stops when he notices. Shigure's afraid that he's the same person as ever, and that he's only now starting to see the tells.

He checked his mother's curse. Valla is a death trap; the throne hexes its inhabitants. Shigure's mother will be alive for a very, very long time. Shigure will never touch the throne, and he's fine with that, fine with the loss of his nobility. And Nina was always more into the Valla stuff. He and his sister don't talk anymore.

Sometimes, they ask the Vallan ambassador what he's doing here. Shigure has a few answers, but none of them are honest. How do you talk about this? About everyone you know unraveling at the edges, light pouring over the seams? Shigure's been catapulted into power, into a position he knows he's capable of handling but nonetheless does not know how to handle, and his every action is celebrated as unassailable battle-won genius. He doesn't know these two countries, can't massage their tense muscles.

They're playing a game now, the two of them. They're in love and they both know it, and they're going to pretend they're not until Shigure decides to commit. He can't imagine what that's like on Dwyer, what it feels like to know that the man you love doesn't know if you're safe enough to be around, to be with: what it's like to know that you at your best are still a calculated risk.

Shigure has a ring in his left breast pocket. It's been there since their first meeting, since his first day home. Shigure is many, many things, not all of them good, but he knows what he wants and he's willing to get it. 

* * *

 

**Takumi**

He can't stand it, anymore. Anything. He comes home and flips a table after five minutes. He's not dealing with this. Not anymore. Ryoma can go and shove this country up his ass. Did he remember what they'd been through? He's not going to put up with this, no sir. With what? With anything.

When you've been forced to fight for nothing, there's a part of you that never stops looking for another fight, never stops looking for the next scrap of nothing you can win. Takumi knows he's a horrible person, can see it in the faces of everyone that loves him, and he's almost stopped giving a shit.

He and Leo fuck in their rooms until Leo gets worried about who might hear them. At this point, the entire Hoshidan castle knows why the Nohrian ambassador is here, but Leo is insistent on maintaining the last of his self-respect, so Takumi does what he's told.

* * *

 

**Nyx**

She knows that Leo's gay. She supposes that's the reason she agreed to mother his child. It's more of a favor than anything, really. She stayed with Forrest in his Deeprealm for his entire life. She found out later she was the only person that did that, that Forrest was the only child that grew up with a mother. Time works differently for Nyx. She spent a lot of time with the other children, the ones that don't know anything about the Moon Witch, the scourge of the Nohrian countryside. She's bad at blessings, but she tried, for a few of them. Perception and loving and a magnetic leadership. Auntie Nyx lingers in the back of everyone's mind as the one person that stayed with them, the only person that ever had time for them. That's a different sort of immortality, she supposes. She will live forever, right now.

She's been around Nohr enough to know its big cultural tells, has seen enough of its history to know that most of it's a lie, that Nohrians are a people that will tell any damn story to not hate themselves. She tries to integrate, for Forrest's sake - Leo's as old as he is, and tries his best to be a father, but anyone's best parenting could never be good enough for someone who's their own age. Nyx has been a mother many, many times. She has practice. She is kind. She loves her children. Forrest is a powerful magician, and she teaches him spells for escape, for disguises, for revealing the truth, for appearing how you want to appear. And, of course, the standard barrage of defensive hexes and fireballs and whatnot. Most of her children have died of old age, and she would like to keep it that way. Leo is for safety, but Nyx knows that safety is something determined by the world around you, that safety is irrelevant when you are powerful enough, that Forrest has a right to be a girl and a boy together or alternately and that Leo does not understand this. Forrest asks her to call him a him. Who he is is complicated and beautiful, and they revel in who they are.

Nyx has always liked the deeprealms more than Nohr, finds the archipelagic nature of Vallan space to be fascinating and delightful, finds the menace of Azura to be an interesting challenge, a slow inevitable corruption as opposed to a meteoric, calamitous descent. Nyx can see herself here for a while, battling whatever evil grows in the spaces between space. And, when Forrest is old enough to stand on his own, and she finds herself without anything to do, Nyx knows she can always come back. Azura greets her like an old friend, like a retainer. Her eyes smolder. Her hands twitch.

Nyx bows, and her long con begins.

* * *

 

**Leo**

Leo knows that he and Takumi are the most fascinating gossip piece in Hoshido. He just misses watching Takumi care about things. Takumi meets his requests as well as he can, which is barely. But anything's a lot better than Leo's used to.  
Takumi is not coping with being back home, and Leo hates himself for not being able to help Takumi and not being able to understand him and not knowing what's going on. He's solved this problem. Takumi hasn't, and Leo will wait for as long as he can and he hopes that it's forever. Sometimes Takumi talks about being forever and always broken by this and Leo's too dead inside to care about that. He'll move on. Time heals all wounds, or at least lets them return to the earth where they belong.

Takumi's afraid that he'll never be okay again. Leo listens and doesn't speak. Takumi loves hard and loves strong and got bent and twisted when he was treated like shit. Leo is something brittle and plastic, strong enough, but too weak where it really counts.

He's planning on taking Takumi back home. That might do him some good.

* * *

 

**Mitama**

She wants to be a person. She wants to be someone. But every time she tries to retreat into her fantasy, her trauma follows her. Her mind follows her, too big to be contained by who she's supposed to be.

She and her friends have been through hell and have been shaped by that hell, shaped into something that can withstand what they've had to withstand. Her tutor told her that it was her job to form her personality, her life into a work of beauty. She can't leave the house, can't talk to people without a creeping emptiness crawling inside of her. She drowns herself in books she can't read. Her father can't get her to leave her room.

There's a part of her that wants nothing more than to be better, to be happy, to have her friends be happy, and that part of her would do anything for them. When Caeldori needs someone to talk to, she listens. When Dwyer's scared, she drags him inside and heals him. And there's another part of her, one much louder, the one that speaks, that wants nothing more than permission to fall apart, to self-destruct, a part of her that doesn't want to get better anymore.  
She's not scared anymore. She knows she should be. But she isn't.

* * *

 

**Dwyer**

He doesn't consider himself to be the type of man that expects too much out of things. But he doesn't look Nohrian and he doesn't look Hoshidan, and he finds he has to use his knives more than once. More as a decoration, a defensive coloration than anything. But he's never liked being that kind of person. Which is another way of saying that he is not in ownership of himself; he, in his servitude, has become something he hates, and there is nothing he can do to undo that. Or, at least, nothing he knows how to do. He has torn himself apart to keep his pages from burning and now he is incomplete and anything that could be done to fix him would be a secondhand addition, a corruption of his binding. 

He learns his countries like he learns languages; slowly gathering rules and vocabulary until something suddenly clicks, and everything becomes second nature. He looks like nothing, but he acts like someone, someone real. Sometimes, he imagines he's a shining stone, reflecting everything around him. It calms him down, keeps him from doing things he knows he'd regret later.

He wants his shop to be a home base, a place where all the timelost can pretend nothing has changed for a few short minutes. It's starting to work, he thinks. Ignatius comes in a few times a month, and Soleil basically lived here for a couple weeks. A few times, Velouria came in to buy extra-strength hair regrowth potions, which weirded him out. And Mitama comes and checks up on him regularly and they revel together in their sorrow. One day, they're going to do something stupid together - if they have the energy. Which they don't. Mitama's great.

Shigure proposed to him a week ago and hasn't been back since. Dwyer would be lying if he said he was surprised. Dwyer would also technically be lying if he said that he reciprocated Shigure's feelings fully. He's bad at that.

He really, really wants to.

"Shigure, the thing is, you talk to lots of people that talk to lots of people. You don't need people to give you attention; attention is a finite resource that you don't have a lot of. One person giving you a lot of attention is an anomaly because it is unnecessary; Corrin has enough on her plate without listening to you talk.  
I'm not like that. You come here and I talk to you, because you're the only person I see that's more stable than me. You're this wunderkind ambassador and a budding artist and I'm me, and you deserve better. I - I'm just lonely."

Dead silence for fifteen seconds. Neither of them moved.

"You really believe that the only reason I'm doing this is because you give me special attention?"

No, he thinks. No. Please listen to me. I want what's best for you.

"You want me to answer that?"

No matter what he says, this is going to end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> get outta here with yer ships **my** favorite headcanon is best mom Nyx

**Author's Note:**

> is this fandom even alive anymore


End file.
